Boy Leven

Boy Leven. That was my brother’s given name on his death certificate. Born September 6, 1953; died September 8, 1953—a year and a month before my birth, and two years after my sister’s. My dad’s name is listed as the father; my mother’s name is, curiously, her maiden name—misspelled. He is in an unmarked grave somewhere in Oak Forest Cemetery in Chicago, which served as Cook County’s Potter's Field until the early ‘70s. In that place, there are over 90,000 burials in an open field, in anonymous graves. They are Chicago’s indigent and unidentified souls. My brother, neither indigent nor unidentified, is one of them.  

I was 10 years old when I learned of this baby. I don’t know what prompted my parents to suddenly divulge this long-held secret, but I do believe they almost immediately regretted telling me.  I was full of questions they didn’t expect and clearly didn’t want to answer. Did he have a name? Did you hold him? How did he die? Did you want another boy? Then, choking back tears, “Was I the replacement?”

“He was six weeks premature,” my mom says, tersely, dismissively. “I never saw him. I think we named him Peter.” She thinks? How could she forget? Forgetting and then not talking, or not talking and then forgetting—that’s what this was all about. My father tries to satisfy my angst: if he had lived, I wouldn’t have been born. They only wanted two children, my dad explains, biological replacements, zero population, how he’s been reading about rapid population growth…My mom cuts him off with one more comment: “It was Susie’s fault.” 

Susie, my beloved grandmother, the one who took me—just me—for overnights in her Lincoln Park apartment that smelled of coffee and Intimacy perfume. At night, both of us in our nightgowns and slippers, slurping Black Cows, would ride the elevator to her roof with a clear view of Chicago’s skyline. It was “fairyland,” she’d say, pointing to all the window “Tinkerbell” lights.  She’d point out which building Snow White lived in. And Cinderella. And Sleeping Beauty.  I thought Susie was magical. 

“It was very hot that summer,” my mom continues. “I asked Susie if I could sleep in their basement and she said that wouldn’t work for her that week.” She blows air out of her nose and purses her lips at that point. I decided not to believe my mom, and I never asked Susie to explain.

The day I learned about Peter (was that his name?), I imagined him tall and thin. He has brown hair like mine, soft eyes, a wide smile, a full laugh. He is soft-spoken and even-tempered; he is protective of me. I thought, fleetingly, he’d be my Wally Cleaver. But we were decidedly not the Cleavers.

I had the first bedroom at the top of the stairs. One day, when I was 11, my dad pounded up the stairs, bellowing that I was goofing off too much. I was busy making a doll’s house for my troll dolls from paper and tape, constructed in my bedroom cabinet. The top shelf was the upstairs; the bottom was the kitchen and living room. I had drawn pictures on the living room paper walls—a picture of some daisies, and a fireplace—with Crayola canary-yellow and red-orange flames. A few stacked dominoes made a table in the kitchen and my troll dolls were having a pleasant family dinner. I don’t remember what I was supposed to be doing. Maybe feeding the cats? Maybe vacuuming? Folding towels? He kicked in my door, saw my doll’s house, and tore through it with both hands, crumpling my fire and flowers into balled fists. Mom flew into my room, screaming at my dad to stop. They both stomped off, fighting. Paula, my older sister, was soundless in her room, under the radar. 

I sat shaking. The plaster behind my door knob was indented in the shape of the knob; cracks leaked plaster powder, dusting the floor below. I taped a surviving paper wall from my doll house entryway over the weeping wound. That night, my dad came upstairs to fill the hole with plaster. He sheepishly turned to me to say he was sorry. When I didn’t acknowledge the apology, his eyes turned to lasers. He threw down the plaster knife and stormed out of the house. The hole was only half-filled.

A few months after that, my best friend, Donna, was over after school and we were playing dancing ballerinas in the house, twirling and leaping. She knocked over a table and broke an ashtray with a glass-covered tapestry bottom. I brought it to my mom, who called us “wild Indians.” I was in bed, reading and daydreaming, later that afternoon when the door crashed open. It was my dad holding the shards of the ashtray, his hot eyes burning through me.  I ran to hide in my closet. He watched me skitter and yelled something and barreled back down the stairs. When I came out of the closet, I could see the renewed outline of the brass doorknob in the half-filled hole, now with newly made spiderweb cracks creeping their crooked way toward the ceiling.

After a time, I stopped closing my bedroom door. I sacrificed my precious teenaged privacy for a door that couldn’t be kicked open. I studied everyone’s gait in the house and could instinctively read danger or safety by the weight and velocity of the footfall coming up the stairs. I was tuned in, like a prairie dog scanning the terrain before scurrying out of its tunneled den. That light step was my sister, Paula, her nyloned legs crackling against the hem of her skirt. She was coming home after studying at a friend’s house. Safe. The scuffing slippers on the Berber stairs was my mom.  If she was screeching for my dad or Paula on her ascent, I could breathe easy; I wasn’t the one in her sights.

My dad’s approach wasn’t always foreboding; sometimes he’d even be humming or whistling, skipping every other stair. But every two or three months, an unknowable trigger would transform him into a sudden and fierce tempest, a stampeding army of biting red ants, a werewolf at full moon, the heavy house-shaking thuds heading in my direction. Physical violence to my person was rare; the threat of it palpable. 

I still sleep with an open door.

I could have conjured up my big brother on all those rage-filled days and nights of my pre-teen years, but I never did. Years would pass and I barely thought of him. No, I never longed for Peter after the plaster indentation in my wall was repaired, then kicked in again, repaired, then kicked, and repaired and kicked. Maybe I just didn’t want to bring him into this family.  

But now that I am older and I find myself largely widowed from my birth family; both parents, Susie and all her daughters gone, and my sister and I estranged, I find myself thinking of Peter again. DNA tracking allowed me to find his death certificate online. A weather app confirmed that the first week of September 1953 was indeed hellishly hot in Chicago. Those are the only facts I have. The rest I must fill in with vague musings of the Boy Leven who would have had my chair at the table, my bedroom at the top of the stairs, my closet to hide in, and my life to live.

I wonder if a boy would have had an easier time in my family, more respect, less vulnerability. When I had my son, my mother told me, wistfully, how sweet little boys are. Would a boy have been subjected to my parents' emotional bullying? Would my sister still be talking to him? Would he be a kind man today? I answer these questions: somewhat, probably, and yes. And at this moment, of all the relatives I could bring back if I had that power—even the dearest ones to me—I would want first to meet Boy Leven, my brother. I’d look into his soft eyes, say his name, and hold him tight.

In her career, Nora Leven was a freelance feature writer and essayist, regularly published in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Minnesota Monthly, Corporate Report Minnesota, Minneapolis/St. Paul magazine, Daughter's Magazine, and many other local and regional journals. She is now retired and working on memoir vignettes that she plans to pull together in a volume. Originally from Chicago, she lives in Minneapolis with her husband and two grand-dogs.